GPO's not appliec

We found out that our gpo's are not applied anymore. We've already checked that the security filtering is set the right way. We keep seeing that they're inaccessible when running the group policy results. The group policy also appears in numbers when reviewing in group policy results. Not with its name.

This morning I woke up to an email from a fellow Group Policy MVP–Martin Binder–warning that folks were seeing GP Processing issues after the recent slew of Patch Tuesday updates were applied. Indeed, I had noted late on Tuesday via Twitter

A GPO with no Authenticated Users in Security Filtering

And you’d removed Authenticated Users completely from the GPO’s delegation, then GPO processing for per-user settings would fail after applying MS16-072. As the day went on, I mostly ignored this issue, until tonight I read the KB article surrounding this patch in detail. Specifically, there’s a section called Known Issues where it says the following:

“MS16-072 changes the security context with which user group policies are retrieved. This by-design behavior change protects customers’ computers from a security vulnerability. Before MS16-072 is installed, user group policies were retrieved by using the user’s security context. After MS16-072 is installed, user group policies are retrieved by using the machines security context”
Um….that’s big. What it’s saying is that per-user GP processing has fundamentally changed. It goes on to further say:
“This issue may occur if the Group Policy Object is missing the Read permissions for the Authenticated Users group or if you are using security filtering and are missing Read permissions for the domain computers group.”
Indeed, many people found that by adding back the Authenticated Users Access Control Entry (ACE) to the GPO’s delegation with Read access (NOTE: I AM SAYING READ ACCESS–THIS IS DIFFERENT THAN READ AND “APPLY GROUP POLICY”, which will have the affect of nullifying any security group filtering you are using on the GPO) per-user GP processing will go back to working. The above referenced article says that you can add either Authenticated Users or Domain Computers with Read access on the GPO to solve this, because the per-user settings are running in the computer’s security context, so adding Domain Computers should give the computer the access it needs to continue processing those per-user settings.
Mitigation
OK, again, this is a BIGGGGG change, and I’m sure a lot of folks got broken by this. What I’ve done is created a quick PowerShell script for those who have a lot of GPOs in your environment and don’t want to manually make this change. What the script does is get a list of all of your GPOs in the current domain. It then iterates through them, checks to see if the Authenticated Users or Domain Computers groups are found in the GPO’s delegation. If not found, then the script adds the Read (only) permission to the GPO for Authenticated Users. You might decide you’d rather use Domain Computers, because some people have purposefully prevented Authenticated Users from reading their GPOs to prevent unwanted security posture discovery. You can easily modify the script to add Domain Computers instead of Authenticated Users by modifying line 9 of the script. Note that this script needs the Group Policy PowerShell module that is part of GPMC to be installed to function:

GPO Permission script for MS16-072
Download the Script File

PLEASE NOTE: THIS SCRIPT CHANGES PERMISSIONS ON YOUR GPOs. Test first in a non-production environment before running it against your live GPOs. It’s provided for you as-is, with no warranty!
June 16 Edit: I made a change to the script, to have it check for GPOs that contain user settings, since we’re only interested in doing this fix for GPOs with per-user settings. Also note that Microsoft has just released an assessment-only script here.

Next Steps
I’ve been asked if this is a bug that Microsoft will fix. If you read the article I mention above, it sure doesn’t seem like they see it as a bug, but rather a change in behavior in the interests of security. I agree that making GP secure is critical to ensuring it can do it’s job of, well, securing your Windows systems. I wish they had given a little bit more notice on this so it didn’t break people’s GP environments, but, hey, at least NOW we know :-).

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